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Wednesday, December 17, 2014

A Streetcar Named Liar

Everything you’ve heard from the city of Portland about its streetcar lines is a lie. That seems to be the conclusion of the latest review of the operation by the city of Portland’s own city auditor.
Portland Streetcar, the private organization contracted to run the
streetcar for the city, claims to have met the city’s on-time goals. The
audit finds that it hasn’t. Portland Streetcar claims to have increased
ridership by 500,000 riders in fiscal year 2014. The audit finds that
that Portland Streetcar overstated ridership by 19 percent and actually
ridership was 1.1 million trips less than claimed.
The auditor is also unimpressed by claims that the streetcar has
generated billions of dollars worth of economic development. “Based on
studies [Portland Bureau of Transportation] provided to us,” says the
audit, “we conclude this research has yet to describe a causal
relationship of how streetcars may affect economic development.” In
other words, it’s just another fabrication.
This audit follows up on another review
earlier this year in which the auditor concluded that the supposed
public-private partnership imposes all risks on the public and no
responsibility on the private partner. What else should we expect when
Portland Streetcar is less a business and more of a revolving door
for left-wing politicians and city bureaucrats? The latest audit points
out that the streetcar maintenance facility, which is supposed to be
run by Portland Streetcar, is staffed by 51 people from TriMet, 16 from
Portland’s Bureau of Transportation, and all of 3 from Portland
Streetcar.
There’s one good thing about the streetcar, at least if you are a
Portland auto driver annoyed by the city’s aggressive cyclists. More than two-thirds of Portland cyclists
surveyed in 2008 said they’ve crashed on the streetcar tracks. There’s
an engineering fix–putting rubber flaps on the rails that are flexible
enough for the streetcars to push out of the way but too stiff for
bicycles to sink into. But Portland Streetcar doesn’t want to install
them because it’s too expensive and they’d have to replace them every
two or three years.
As a cyclist myself, I’m not too impressed by this argument.
Considering that the 2013 American Community Survey found that more than
18,000 workers living in the city of Portland bicycle to work while
only 7,800 take some form of rail transit–including both streetcars and
light rail–it seems like the city has its priorities exactly backwards. I
hope officials from other cities who look to Portland as a model for
transportation planning take the time to read these auditsORIGINAL HERE
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A Portland transportation official told city auditors it was "unnecessary" to highlight Portland Streetcar's inflated ridership numbers in a new report, according to documents obtained under the state's public records law.
City auditors reported Dec. 11 that estimated streetcar ridership
last fiscal year was 4.5 million, about 1.1 million fewer rides than the
5.6 million originally reported by Portland Streetcar Inc.
Officials overstated ridership by 19 percent.
TriMet uncovered the mistake in response to questions from auditors.
Portland Streetcar provided accurate streetcar ridership to auditors
Dec. 3.
In response, auditors revised their draft report to highlight the
discrepancies, adding a chart to show the gap between reported and
actual ridership.
But when a new version of the audit was shared with the Portland
Bureau of Transportation before publication, to ensure its accuracy, the
city's streetcar manager, Kathryn Levine, complained.
Levine argued that officials provided the revised figures to ensure
that readers of the audit had accurate ridership data. TriMet, she
wrote, had "acted with integrity after finding an error" and worked to
correct the numbers.
"This late addition of a new section to the audit appears
unnecessary, particularly as the information has no impact on the audit
recommendations," Levine wrote in a Dec. 5 email obtained by The Oregonian.
"I am disappointed by the text and a graph ... that appears designed
to highlight a mistake rather than recognize the agency for taking
corrective action."
An auditor responded by telling Levine they had an obligation to highlight the discrepancy.
While auditors originally found some minor problems with ridership
numbers, which they planned to note in a methodology section of the
audit, the new numbers needed to be called out more clearly, auditors
wrote.
The "corrected data recently provided by TriMet resulted in an error
effect which we could not ignore," Tenzin Choephel, a senior management
auditor, wrote in response. "Nineteen percent is a significant
difference for a measure that was already described in the scope of the
audit and a fiscal year which was clearly within our audit period."
While the overall audit recommendations didn't change, Choephel
concluded, "we consider the ridership error as another example of
questionable Portland Streetcar performance results."
Had auditors not publicly called attention to the inflated ridership,
would Portland Streetcar or the Bureau of Transportation highlighted
the problems?
Dan Bower, executive director for Portland Streetcar, told The
Oregonian on Tuesday that he initially scrambled to get correct
ridership information to the nonprofit's board of directors and posted
online.
"My intention was, and still is, to post an explanation on our
website and share that through social media just as we would with any
other ridership information," Bower said in an email to The Oregonian.
While Bower didn't complain to auditors about their decision to
spotlight the ridership mistakes, he did express displeasure about how
the audit would ultimately report on-time performance.
In a Sept. 15 email, also obtained through a public records request,
Bower told Choephel that he didn't agree with how the figures were
represented graphically.
Portland Streetcar sets an on-time performance target of 98 percent
and reported that those goals were being met. But the audit found
streetcars are on schedule 82 percent of the time.
Bower suggested that monthly performance should be graphed on a chart
from 0 percent to 100 percent, rather than 60 percent to 100 percent,
as auditors had done.
Starting that scale at 60 percent "overemphasizes the difference between reported performance and actual," Bower wrote in his Sept. 15 email.
"It's far enough apart that it doesn't need to be further distorted by scale."Reporting inflated streetcar ridership dubbed 'unnecessary,' city tells auditor: Portland City Hall Roundup | OregonLive.com